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No exaggeration, these are the best burgers I have ever eaten. I was blown away by how well they worked out, and thrilled that they made so many servings that I could have left overs three times. My friend KT, who helped me make and eat dinner with equal levels of enthusiasm, also agreed that they were spectacular. Bulgur wheat impulse buy, you were an excellent decision.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The story starts months ago, in the community shop which has since closed. I must have been swept away on a cloud of optimism about my culinary skills because I bought a large quantity of a product I had never used before, never eaten, never even heard of: bulgur wheat. I took it home, put it into a glass jar, stuck the jar in the cupboard and immediately forgot what it was.

Fast-forward to last week, and I found myself clearing out the cupboards in anticipation of my imminent move (for more details, see my life blog). The jar of mystery grain-like substance perplexed me for several minutes until my blundering around Wikipedia led me to an article on bulgur and a lightbulb went off in my brain. Like a good little child of the 90s I immediately googled for a recipe.

As regular readers (do I still have any of those?) will know, I don’t like recipes with extensive or exotic ingredient lists. In particular, when I’m about to move house, I don’t want to be buying things I won’t necessarily use again for months. So I was pleased to find this recipe on Epicurius. I had everything I needed to make the burgers – I decided not to bother with the lime mayonnaise – and it looked straightforward. Naturally I switched out some things; I used kidney beans instead of pinto, ditched the cilantro, used curry powder instead of cumin (I’d packed the cumin, for some reason) and didn’t add any salt as KT and I both felt the soy sauce was salty enough. We also threw in a couple of mushrooms, because mushroom burgers are probably the best thing ever.

My goodness, they were delicious. I will definitely be making these again! The only thing I’ll do differently is chop things more finely, because my blender wasn’t really up to the challenge of pulsing walnuts and the chunks of mushroom and onion had a tendency to escape in the pan. But they held together really well, browned beautifully, were moist without feeling undercooked, were textured without being busy, and had a wonderful blend of flavours. Go and make them immediately, you won’t regret it.